Sites can be requested and used to establish a web presence under the utexas.edu domain.

Please note that this service is not approved for course-related activities and does not meet the FERPA requirements or hosting Confidential data. Faculty and students are strongly encouraged to utilize Canvas for fulfilling their classroom and instructional needs.

Available to:Students,Faculty and Staff

Features

Log in with your UT EID login information

Control the visibility of your blog

Customize the look of your blog with six available themes, including two UT-branded themes

Track statistics, including how many people have visited your blog

A Web address in the utexas.edu domain

Cost

University Blog Service is available at no cost to current faculty, staff, and students.

Service Level Objectives

Key Metrics

Availability: 99%

Overview

The University Blog Service is available for use by current faculty, staff, and students; however the service does not meet the FERPA requirements and is not approved to host Confidential data. Additionally, the service is not approved for course-related activities. Faculty and students are encouraged to utilize Canvas for fulfilling their classroom needs.

The service uses WordPress multi-site (MS). Blogs and websites can be created for departments, individuals, groups or projects. Additional information about this service can be found on the University Blog Services page.

Service description

A recent version of the WordPress MS software is made available to the intended customers. For this service, recent is defined as six months. The login process is encrypted and uses UT EIDs for authentication.

Blog platform: A single installation of the WordPress MS (multi-site) software that supports multiple blogs for multiple users, published to http://sites.utexas.edu.

Themes: A pre-determined set of themes for users to select. This service does not provide custom themes for individual users.

Storage: Each blog has a maximum of 250 MB (megabytes) for publishing documents (.pdf, .xls, .ppt, etc.) and multimedia (.png, .jpg, .mov, .wav, etc.). UT Box should be used as a storage location for large documents and media.

Statistics: An administrative tool for blog owners to view basic statistics like hits and popular pages with the Google Analytics.

Spam Protection: Akismet plugin is utilized across the service to provide protection from comment and trackback spam.

Plugins & widgets: A pre-determined set of plug-ins and widgets. This service does not allow users to install plug-ins or widgets.

Supported Computing Environment

Visitors are able to view sites on the University Blog Service using any device running an up to date browser.

The WordPress MS software will be upgraded on a regular basis following these criteria:

A stable production upgrade version of WordPress MS has been released for at least two months. Exceptions will be made for security upgrades.

The stable production upgrade version of WordPress MS is compatible with all required plug-ins.

Intended users

The University Blog Service can be used by faculty, staff, and students. The service is not approved for course-related activities. Students and faculty are encouraged to utilize Canvas for fulfilling their classroom or instructional needs.

Technical support

Both Tier 1 and Tier 2 technical support is available during normal business hours, 8 a.m. - 5 p.m., to handle routine requests. Routine requests are typically addressed within one business day.

All requests for technical support will be logged using the ITS centralized ticketing system help@its.utexas.edu.

Tier 1

Initial support requests can be directed to the UT Service Desk at 512-475-9400 or help@its.utexas.edu.

Tier 2

Issues that cannot be handled by Tier 1 (like site creation) will be escalated to Tier 2.

Maintenance

ITS will notify customers about maintenance or service disruptions using the Alerts and Outages page page. Services may not be available during the maintenance periods.

Normal Service Availability: The University Blog Service is designed to be available for customer use 24-hours-per-day, seven days-per-week, 365 days-per-year (24/7/365) excluding scheduled maintenance times.

Scheduled maintenance may occur weekly on Thursdays from 5-10 p.m. To the maximum extent possible, installation of server and application updates will be performed during scheduled maintenance.

Unscheduled maintenance tasks that require service downtime will be announced as soon as possible on the Alerts and Outages page page.

Change notification: ITS will notify the university community using ITS distribution lists of service change notifications; the IT Architecture & Infrastructure > Web Technologies & Infrastructure Subcommittee oversees service changes.

Dependencies

The University Blog Service is dependent on the uTexas Enterprise Directory (TED), ITS MySQL Service, ITS Virtual Services as well as the campus network and related systems. The availability of those services will have a direct impact on the availability of the University Blog Service.